SDSU freshman impacts game with his shot-blocking ability

Nevada at Aztecs

The kids hanging around Centinela Park in Inglewood loved when Vic Spencer brought his tall, lanky son to the basketball courts on weekends. What kid doesn’t like free ice cream?

Vic also brought a ball and some duct tape. Had young Skylar stand there patiently while he strapped his right arm to his side with rolls of tape — riiiiiiiiiiip — wrapped around his stomach. He’d yank at his arm a few times to make sure it was tight, make sure his son couldn’t move it, then explain to him for the millionth time the value of being ambidextrous in sports, the gold in developing a left hand.

“I would pay kids to play him one-on-one,” Vic says. “‘Here’s a buck to get some ice cream. Just don’t go soft on him.’ They would bump him pretty good, but eventually he started beating them. It would make other parents mad. They’d say: ‘You going to let that boy beat you with one hand?’”

The losers would trot off and buy ice cream. Skylar would play the next victim.

He was 8.

He’s 18 now, and the grand experiment of a father who never played basketball now wears a San Diego State uniform. Spencer is a 6-foot-9 forward who, perhaps as soon as today against Nevada (3 p.m., NBC Sports Network), will break both the school and Mountain West freshman records for blocks. The former is 45 by Leonard Allen, the latter 44 by Utah’s Andrew Bogut and Colorado State’s Michael Morris; Spencer has 43 with at least six games remaining.

Here’s the scary part: Bogut, in his eighth NBA season, did it while averaging 30.4 minutes as a freshman. Spencer averages half that for SDSU.

“Sky can become a real game-changer, the way he blocks shots,” Aztecs senior Chase Tapley says. “He’s going to be one of the greats to leave this program if he keeps working hard and stays focused and stays humble. No pun intended: The sky is the limit for Sky.”

Actually, pun intended. Vic Spencer, a retired fireman, says his mother often told him he was named Victor because he wasn’t a loser, because he would make something of his life. He followed the pattern with his only son, fully cognizant that Skylar would be shortened to Sky and that the sky is the limit and all that.

He also knew his son would be tall — Skylar’s mother, Celia, is 6-2 — and he vowed not to let him grow up with the stigma he did, as a tall kid constantly fielding questions about why he didn’t play basketball.

So he rolled tennis balls to Skylar in his crib, making sure to give equal attention to his right and left hands. He signed him up for karate to build hand-eye coordination and speed. He “wrassled” with his son every day on the living room floor to make him tougher, until Skylar, then 13, “nearly broke my neck.”